


falling

by kitsune13tamlin



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Kuron (Voltron)-centric, Operation Kuron (Voltron), Shiro (Voltron)-centric, Spoilers for season 6, all shiros are good shiros, cloneganes, tw: body horror in chapter 4
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2019-05-25 13:49:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14978477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsune13tamlin/pseuds/kitsune13tamlin
Summary: spoilers for season 6.  What did happen to all those clones after the Black Paladins episode?  Well, most of them died.but some of them didn't.





	1. Chapter 1

He wakes up - 

because he’s falling.

he’s falling and every instinct in him says to eject.   _Now!_  Before the ship crashes!  His hand scrambles automatically for the handle, the one that’s trained into him to reach for - but there’s nothing there.  Just sleek, hard metal. His eyes snap open, refuse to focus for a dangerously long minute in the vertigo of a freefall tumble and then he sees the glass of a canopy overhead, sees stars wheeling past, raises both hands and _slams_ them, adrenaline pumping through him against the translucence that protects him from the stars.  

That keeps him from them.

 _You’ll die in space.  There are a million ways to die in space._  
  
The glass doesn’t budge and he’s still falling, stomach lurching end over end, and now he can smell something electric burning. His survival instinct kicks him hard in the gut because he’s going to die here and he can’t.  He can’t die.   He’s not _done_.

The glass jars under the strikes from his fists but holds firm.  How far left does he have before impact?  How much longer until the ground hits?  If there’s gravity, there’s a down.  And if there’s a _down_ , there’s something to hit, hard, at the bottom of it.  He’s out of time - and yet his hands go scrabbling desperately for a latch or a seal or a lever, something, anything to get him out of the cockpit and into freefall.  Something screams past his ship, heavy and falling faster and he feels the impact as it goes past, as it clips his own ship - how small is his ship? - and sends it stomach lurching, careening.  Desperate, he slams his fists against the glass again, feels the skin of them split with the force -  
  
and the canopy jars open.

Not much.  Something outside was probably broken in the impact. But no vacuum rushes in to steal his breath away and even if he still can’t hear anything, he can see better now.  See chunks of metal falling, thinks maybe its a space station and his mind scrambles to remember how his ship hit a space station.  Io?  Venus!  It must be one of the mining rigs off of Venus.

He’s going to die.

There’s no life outside a contained environment on Venus.

But he twists and wrenches and throws his entire weight at the half cracked canopy all the same. Because he’s going to die if he stays in the - tube? Escape pod?  He doesn’t know, its all fuzzy in his mind but he’s going to die in it when it hits the ground if he’s not loose.

he’s probably going to die when his body hits the ground too but it still feels better than letting the metal canister take him down with it.

 _There!_ He manages to get his shoulders through, feels something graze his temple as it falls past, sees blood, keeps pulling and wiggling and  
  
he’s free!

His body clears the pod and it falls faster than he does.  He spreads his arms and legs, tries to give more surface for wind resistance, reaches to his chest but there’s no control box.  No space suit then.  No jet pack.  Just some tight purple fabric he doesn’t recognize and him falling and what looks like an entire space station falling around him. And, far below, the ground, grey and barren. 

The moon?  Is he on the moon?  But there’s atmosphere!

Another chunk of metal hurtles past him and this has - tubes?  Purple tubes in it.  Maybe like what he came out of - but it snaps his mind out of pointless speculation.  He can figure out where he is later.  If he lives.  But first he has to live.  The ground is coming up and he’s coming down and there’s a great deal of broken sharp metal already ahead of him.

It’s hard but he twists.  Looks back upward.  Sees the stars and inhales, reaching for the clarity of them in his mind.  Stars have always cleared his mind. He pulls desperately at that now, focusing on them past the falling disaster around him.  And then he reaches out and he starts to climb.

It’s not easy.  And its not long before he’s bleeding even more.  He’s only delaying time.  But he reaches out, catches the falling girders and beams and struts and he pulls himself up them as they fall below him.   He’s only gaining himself inches, seconds, but at least he’s gaining them.  He catches one of the tubes, pulls himself up its slick surface and sudden comes face to face with -  
  
_himself?_

The silent scream is automatic, the rejection automatic as he pushed away from the dead face that mirrors his own exactly inside the tube.  His reaction launches him backward, into a falling strut and the impact bounces him forward into another falling chunk of metal, his hands catching at it automatically even as his body screams at the pain from the impact.   Him.   _That was him_!  But - how?!  How the hell?!

The metal he’s hanging on to suddenly bounces off something and rock and grit shower down around him.  His eyes go even wider and his mind snaps to the immediate. _Survive._  It’s a mountain he’s fall past, huge and grey and barren and he’s going to die if he reaches the bottom of that mountain at this speed.  Desperate he pushes off, grabs for the side of the mountain, eats a face full of dirt and rock, threatens to tear his fingers out.  His feet flail.  If he doesn’t get a hold, if he doesn’t at least slow himself down, he’s dead.  But he’s going too fast, gravity has him too tightly  and handholds pull loose with the weight and speed of his passage.    
  
“No.  No, no no no,” he realizes he’s mantraing it as he falls, throat raw, sound lost in the ringing in his head, and he refuses to give up, refuses to stop trying, nails tearing, fingers skinning bloody, body getting torn to hell as he skids full body down the side of the mountain.  He isn’t going to die.  He won’t.  He doesn’t know what’s going on but he is _not_ going to die and he’s going to fight for that right to the end.

And then he catches.  The jerk is so hard, so fast and complete, it almost wrenches his shoulder right out of its socket.  But the fingers of that hand close around - something’s got his wrist.  He looks up, sees - hand.  Someone’s hand has his wrist, hanging off the side of a small cliff break.  Shiro swings his legs, finds footing.  Things are still falling all around him.  It’s only a matter of time before something knocks him loose.  But someone’s got him, just barely, and he pushes off onto his toes, gets his other hand up, catches the corner, the very corner of the small break in the cliff and he starts to pull.  Muscles strain, fell as if they tear but the alternative is death and - no.   He’s already denied death.  He won’t go down without a fight.  The hand on his wrist becomes an arm, wrapped in the same purple fabric he’s wearing and between the two of them, they get him hauled up.  Onto the flat surface, some kind of chunk missing out of the mountain side, get him dragged back under the overhang of it as metal rains down.   Shiro can’t bring himself to let go of the hand holding his wrist - and the hand doesn’t let go either.  Its as if its life itself and the reassurance of it is too necessary and real to let go yet.  In the dim light, he lifts his eyes, grateful beyond any words he knows for the salvation -  
  
and he sees himself looking back at him with eyes just as wide.


	2. Chapter 2

The world goes to hell and Shiro crouches next to his inexplicable twin and watches it.  There’s something terrible about the sheer size and amount of metal falling past their small sanctuary and more than once they flinch against each other as something jars into the outside of the small overhang, threatening to bring it all down before slowly dragging and falling away.  And its all the worse for the sheer silence of it all.  No sound, not the scream of metal, not the heavy thud of the weights that shake the very mountain they’re hiding in - in the thin atmosphere he can’t even hear the ragged breathing of the man pressed next to him even if he can feel it, almost matching time to his own.    
  
That should bother him.  Unnerve him.  There’s another one of him.  And somehow the fact its alive and next to him is worse than knowing the tubes falling past have dead or sleeping versions of himself in them.   Except - the world’s gone mad and Shiro doesn’t even remember how and - somehow having another living body next to him, twitching with each falling tube that careens past - somehow it makes it bearable.  Because Shiro’s not sure how someone’s supposed to stay sane through watching himself, by the hundreds if all the tubes are full, fall past to their death at the bottom of the world.  The same thought comes to both of them at the same time and even as he edges out Shiro feels the man next to him do the same.

They still haven’t let go of each other’s wrists.

Shiro’s not sure he could bring himself to even if he wanted to.

He most definitely doesn’t want to.

Its dangerous, even the quick darting peek out he takes. The speed the pieces of….. space station? are falling at - even a small one could take off his head. But - there’s got to be some way to do something.   There has to be a way. There are so many -   
  
so many falling bodies…..

The fact that they’re falling bodies _of him_ doesn’t mean they’re not still lives in freefall.  That they’re not all still doomed if their canisters reach the bottom.  He wouldn’t wish that anyone, not his worst enemy, and he can’t tell if its the fact they’re shadows of _him_ makes him more or less determined about it.

He can’t think of how to save them.  Not all of them.  But not even the single ones that go spinning past where he is, faster than hoverbikes down a canyon wall.  They’re moving too fast to grab with his hands - they’d take them right off on the way past and not even slow down a hair.  If they had rope or netting or cables or - anything.  But they don’t.  Just four pairs of human hands….. and he tastes the bile in his throat as he watches them fall, fall, fall past him in the silence.

He’s jerked back, yells and can’t hear it, surprise and fruitless adrenaline running through his system too strong for anything but overreactions.   Metal - a strut perhaps - fills the space he was in a second ago, bounces off the stone, takes a chunk of the lip of their overhang with it as it continues its fall down the mountain to the planet’s surface below.   All in eerie silence.  The shudder shakes him hard and there’s a hand on his shoulder.  Awkward because they’re still locked at the wrist so the positioning is awkward but - he needs it.  Grits his teeth, somewhere between a snarl and a lock to hold back helpless tears and he sees his own eyes looking back at him.  Complete understanding.

“We have to do something,” the atmosphere is too thin to carry sound.  He’s surprised they’re even able to breathe this far up, but he needs to say it.  The other him nods.  Mouths ‘I know’.  And then shakes his head and looks back out from under the overhang they’re sheltering under again.  They have to do something - but there’s nothing they can do.  He hates it.  Hates the feeling of inevitability, the hopelessness of it.   
  
Like being told you’re dying - when all you want to do is fight it.

He finally lets go of his twin’s wrist - because he has to clench his fists together.  

“Something,” he mutters it.  "There has to be something.“

But already the metal falling past is in smaller pieces, is starting to lighten in frequency.  Another tube goes past and Shiro realizes it could be the last one. The last chance to save someone - anyone.  His muscles tense.  He could make that leap, he knows he could.  Could grab that canister holding a living being and fall with it and -   
  
and what?  The chances of him finding another safe spot on the way down, another hand to grab him - even if he could, somehow, get the body out of the tube -   
  
The hand that’s never left his shoulder squeezes and his eyes flinch a little at the pain.  Its not bruising pain, not as hard as it could be - but its hard enough to hurt enough to get his attention and he turns to his own matching face, sees the hard negation on it and offers a broken smile of apology.  His twin says something, lifting his face to the ceiling of their overhang but Shiro shakes his head.

"I can’t hear you,” he’s talking to talk, not because he expects a response.  The same way he thinks the other man was probably talking just to do something.   It’s like nodding your head in response to an audio call.  You do it automatically, even if it doesn’t make sense.  “We’ll have to wait until the air isn’t so thin.”  
  
Except the other man looks at him, twitches his brows down, and, thanks to years of space walks, Shiro can read his lips as he mouths:

“You can’t hear me?”

For the second - third, fifth, twentieth? - time, Shiro suddenly feels sick to his stomach.  His mind shuts down in denial.

“You can?”

He’s already dreading, and expecting, the nod when he comes.  The worried look across the other face is expected too.  Shiro lifts his hand, touches one of his ears.  Its cold to the touch but no more than any other extremity is.  He can feel his fingers on it.  Rubs it and gets - nothing.  No interior sound of friction, no hollow shell echo.  Nothing at all.

Just silence.

Torn metal streams past and he realizes its been screaming all along.

He just can’t hear it.


	3. Chapter 3

The climb down the mountain takes an eternity.

There is no sound.  No shift of rock, no hollow sigh of wind.  He can feel his own breathing - but he can’t hear it.  Without sound in his ears, things feel unreal, once removed, and he knows how dangerous that is for his mind, how that slight softening around the edges of his awareness could be the hairline difference in his ability to react fast enough.   That it could get him killed.  

The alternative  - realizing _why_ there is no sound, acknowledging it as real, is unnerving to him.  For so much more than just the loss of hearing.  He hadn’t realized it but - so much of how he measures and judges his surroundings  - and his place in them - relies on sound.  So much more than he would have ever thought.  If he can’t hear himself…. somehow it makes him a little bit less real.   If he can’t hear how the world reacts to him….. maybe his place in it isn’t as stable as he wants to think it is.  It’s all psychological.  He understands that.  But when his fingers knock pebbles loose - and he hears nothing -   
  
Its easier if he tells himself its just space.  That he’s just in space and that’s why there’s no sound.  That once he gets back to the shuttle, the noise will come back and he’ll be able to feel as if he fits the ‘Shiro’ shaped hole in reality that’s his.

Its avoidance and he knows that but he thinks, considering everything else, he should be allowed one little mind trick for himself.  Here, in this alien world with a ruined metal moon above him and himself climbing carefully down the rock face at his left.    
  
With the ground far below littered with ruined versions of his own body.

…..one little game of 'pretend’ can’t make him any more loose from reality than he already is.

They go slow.  Him and the not-him that saved him.  There’s no rope to hold them together and no promise that if one of them falls the other will move fast enough to catch them.  There’s no question that they’ll try.   Exact image or not, unnerving or not, they are the most familiar things they have for each other and Shiro finds he’s almost obsessive about checking from the edges of his eyes on his 'twin’.

Most of the time, he catches glimpses of dark grey looking right back at him.

He’s sure their faces match, the tight, worried, determined strain across the cheeks and forehead, the low, dark eyebrows and the tight lips.   Shiro wants to wake up - except something tells him waking up might find himself somewhere so much worse and that hollow certainty is daunting, a whisper of panic under his ribs that flutters if he gets too close to examining why its there.  He focuses on the mountain and his hands and feet - and the man at his side - instead.

The silence is a sense all on its own.  
  
They come across the first ruined capsule at what’s probably the halfway point down, where the mountain is starting to spread toward its base.   They’ve been picking their way over and past shards of broken metal for a bit, finally able to walk for short parts of their descent and its not unexpected when they navigate around a break in the rock and see the familiar metal and shattered glass, no longer tinted purple, but pale and grey in the thin atmosphere of this lifeless planet.  They both jerk to a stop in the same moment, look at each other in the same motion and Shiro suddenly hates the complete sync in the way they move.  He doesn’t need himself.  He needs someone -   
  
real.  He needs someone real.  

  
Intentional, he looks back at the capsule even though he wants to find the reassurance on his twin’s face instead and it breaks their mirror moves. Its reassuring.  They’re not the same person.  There are differences even if its just his making them with his decisions.  His twin moves first and Shiro makes himself wait a heart beat, two, before he follows so they’re still out of step with each other as they approach the ruins of the capsule.  It’s twisted, its final resting place isn’t the first time it hit something, and the metal skeleton of it is buckled.    
  
They don’t even have to get very close to it to see what’s happened to the body inside, stopping together at the same distance away and Shiro shudders, hearing only silence in his ears but imagining screams.    
  
His own hoarse screams and then the pitch of them rising in agony as bones break and the body contorts.    
  
What’s left in the capsule isn’t recognizable as himself.  Through what’s left of the broken glass and the peeled back metal the view is more than enough to show that.  What’s left in that tube is hardly even recognizable as human.  Except for the bones showing through.  And the arm that, somehow, stayed intact and now hangs, pointless, through the broken glass of the far side, dripping red onto the alien stone below.   Whatever the body doubles are - they bleed human crimson.    
  
Its too much.  All at once, its suddenly too much, an unexpected hit to his gut and his mind, overwhelming.  Too real and yet at the same time too unreal as well.  It’s too much and he turns away, nausea backing up in his throat, panic and pain and human reaction to violent death.  He claps his hand over his mouth and squeezes the fingers in as tight as he can until it hurts, short breathes through his nose.  Fighting the wave of nausea the way he trained to at the Garrison.  No one wants to throw up in their helmet in zero-G with no atmosphere.  It clogs his throat, burning and he forces it back down even if it makes his eyes water.    
  
Fuck this.  Fuck it all.  Whatever the hell it is - fuck it all to hell -  
  
Another swallow and he’s shaking but not in danger of throwing up any more.  Who knows when he ate last but he suspects its going to be a long time before he eats again.  Whatever’s left in his stomach, he needs it to stay there.  There’s a bump against his shoulder and he turns his head without lifting it or removing his hand.  Sees his own face looking back and the sheer misery and horror on it probably matches his own.   Somehow it doesn’t matter.  He can focus on someone else’s hurt.  It helps his own.  His hand drops away from his face and he leans into that shoulder and a few seconds later risks an arm around the other pair of shoulders.  Feels the grunt he can’t hear and then his twin is leaning hard into him and they’re somewhere between a hug and a support hold.   He doesn’t care.  He needs it.  He can almost pretend its his brother when they’re like this and he shuts his eyes hard against the sudden tears and digs the fingers from both hands in to hold on to the other man, feeling the same dig into his own abused back.  

He needs that.  He needs this.

Its his breathes that finally slow first and he lets himself concentrate on the other him, the shuddering way they stutter through rapid breathing.  The air here is thin, he can tell that much and he suddenly worries - what if something goes wrong?  What if his newly found twin hyperventilates, passes out - simple suddenly stops breathing?  Death was an easy thing to understand and an easy fear to accept but suddenly all the hundred - thousand - deadly little problems rush his mind.  The ones that aren’t instant death.  The ones that are little things that lead to death.  Or crippling.  He sucks in his own wet breath, feeling it catch somewhere in his throat and holds the other him closer.  He doesn’t want to die -   
  
but even more he doesn’t want someone else to die.  Die and leave him all alone -   
_  
__if you go - I won’t be here when you get back_  


The memory is clear and he winces at it, at the voice of it inside his head. His arms tightened around the body in them.    
  
He won’t be the one walking away if something goes wrong.

A sharp slap on his back drags him into the present and he grunts, opens his eyes and realizes the body in his arms is wiggling.  Lets go enough to realize he’s been holding on too tightly but the face that lifts to him is slightly smiling, a little lopsided, a little wry.  Warm and understanding.  
  
“Me too,” his twin says to him, lips easy to read.  "Me too, buddy.“

And hands shift to curl around his arms and give a tight squeeze.

Its both reassuring and a little unnerving - to have someone that can read your mind because its theirs too - but right now Shiro feels more of the reassurance than the unnerving.  He manages a tight smile back.

"Let’s go,” he agrees and they manage to get to their feet again without entirely letting go of each other.    
  
There’s no question between them.  They don’t look back as they leave the area and continue their descent.

Whoever it had been - one of their own in that canister - there’s no helping him.    
  
It doesn’t make what they’ll find when they get to the bottom of the mountain feel any more promising.

It doesn’t matter.  They have to keep going.  There’s no alternative.

The mountain starts to widen out, the path gets easier to find picking their way down on their feet now instead of pressed with their faces against rock.

And the evidence of the destruction from the overhead moon gets more plentiful.  Shiro thinks about it as he picks his way carefully around yet another fallen ruin of something metal that’s twisted beyond anything he can recognize.  The body suit he’s in isn’t from Earth.  These canisters and the rest of the fallen - space station? - aren’t from Earth.  His brain feels disorganized, cluttered - as if being jarred around in the fall had jarred around his memories as well.  He remembers Earth.  He remembers home.  He remembers the Garrison.  As careful as he picks his way down the mountain behind his twin, he picks his way through his memories in the silence.  He remembers - he remembers, out of nowhere, that he has a degenerative disease - unexpected and yet then it makes sense as it slots into place inside of him and reminds him of the mission to Kerberos.  Adam walking away.  Commander Holt standing by him.  Keith’s worried little kid eyes silently asking if yet another person in his life was going to abandon him by dying.  Shiro’s feet skid a little and his twin turns a head with a questioning look but Shiro shakes a negative and keeps going.

Keeps picking his way through the jumbled memories that are starting to sort out now that he’s got time.

He remembers the lift off.  He remembers Matt and Sam and the trip out to Kerberos.  That makes him smile.  Fills his chest, for the first time, with warmth and makes it a little easier to breathe.  Those had been good months.  Healing months.  He remembers touch down on Kerberos and the first step out onto its surface.  He remembers lifting his face in the direction of an Earth so far away he couldn’t even see it as more than yet another star and then looking down at his own foot in the silt of Kerberos and knowing he’d made it.

Still smiling to himself, he remembers ice samples and then -   
  
The memory hits him so hard that he loses his footing and pitches forward to his knees, not even noticing the pain as the skin scrapes on rock and gravel.  Instead his hands go to clutch his head, which sudden feels as if its splitting and the air wheezes into his lungs, thin and strained.

He remembers the alien ship - Galra - he remembers the carelessness of the voice over the screen, he remembers being dragged past an utter hive of prison cells.

He remembers -   
  
that’s all.

That’s all he remembers.    
  
After that, the rest of his mind is a jumbled mess of crippling emotions that don’t have a secure reference point to pin them too.  Horror, fury, terror, disgust, animal pain, violence - he’s gasping and wheezing, tears pouring down his cheeks, and he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t -   
  
a fist hits him in the chest so hard it knocks him back and the instinctive inhaled jerk of air at it breaks the trapped cycle of trying to breathe through closed airways.   It also startles him enough that he looks up, wide eyed, to see his twin on his knees nearby as well, worry and fear on his face easy to recognize.    
  
“I can’t - ” Shiro manages it, barely, hits his own chest with his fist, though a little lighter, as if it can knock the words or the air loose.  "I remember.  I remember Kerberos.  I remember the aliens.“    
  
He can’t hear his own voice but he can imagine it sounds about as panicked and half a step from reality as he feels and he watches his own mirror of a face go through registering that as well before -   
  
when the hands reach out for him he almost draws back.  There’s something inside him - now - that said hands reaching is a vile thing, something to be refused or resisted.  Except - no.  Shiro knows these hands and he knows what he really needs and so he scoots himself forward deliberately until his twin can wrap his arms around him.   He shuts his eyes then, as soon as they do, feeling how grounding and natural and -   
  
good. This is right.  This is safe.  This is how things should be.  He leans and lets the other one support him and he works first on breathing and then on slowly forcing all the emotions and memories into neater boxes, separating them to sort through at another time, carefully folding them into place until he can see past the panic and the shaking fear.  Until he stabilizes enough to lightly tap his twin’s arm before curling fingers.

"I’m okay,” he says it for both of them.  "I’m okay now.  Just - sorting through the new memories.“

His twin holds him close and it takes Shiro a long moment before -   
  
"What’s wrong?”

Because - there’s something in the way he’s being held that, instinctively tells him something’s not right.  Something’s not the way it should be. It’s another long moment - and he can’t even see his twin’s face the way he’s settled into the other man.  Finally, he watches his twin’s hand move.  A quick two fingered tap, straight out, against his own hand.  Astronaut code because sometimes its even quicker than the coms when you’re space walking.  This is one of the most basic.

“No confirmation.”

Shiro goes still and then frowns, eyebrows starting to come down.  Careful not to untangle himself from his twin he turns his head and shifts so he can see the mirror of his own face.  Looking down at him, carefully held tight and still against a revelation.  Shiro knows that look because its the one he wore when the doctor’s reports finally came back with an answer to what was wrong with his manual dexterity.    
  
Quiet, he clarifies:

“You don’t remember any of that?”

Grey eyes meet his own and they’re haunted.

His twin shakes his head.


	4. Chapter 4

“What are we going to do with him?”

Shiro didn’t need to hear the intonation behind the question as he watched it leave his twin’s mouth.  He knew what it would sound like all the same. Because he would have asked the same question - and in the same way.

They weren’t alone.

He thought they’d both suspected, and yet not dared dwell on whether it was hope or horror, that they couldn’t possibly be the only ones that had survived - well, whatever it was that had left a ruined moon station above them and littered the planet below with their own corpses and alien looking construction.  Shiro knew he’d been dreading it himself, terrified that they’d find someone half alive, dying slow and terrible, in pain and far from any kind of medical help. And they’d have to make the call.

Mercy kill or try to save them?

That they’d have to decide that someone was past saving.

That they’d have to kill someone.

And Shiro didn’t know whether he found it better or worse that they’d have to do it, barehanded, somehow quickly (hopefully), to someone that looked exactly like them.

So when he’d spotted this version of them, after he and his twin had finally reached ground level, or what passed for it on this planet at this point, someone sitting up at least, catching his twin’s arm and feeling the way both of them hesitated, not sure, suddenly and without knowing why, whether they wanted another in their group of two.  Whether they wanted to be seen at all.  
In the end, the hesitation hadn’t been enough.  Whether it felt comfortable or not, they’d needed to keep going, needed to make the connection and so they’d approached.

And the man had never responded.  

The twin crouched in front of him now, looking over his shoulder and up at Shiro where he stood, only half conscious of it, guard at his twin’s back.  As ready for the man in front of both of them to attack as anything else and that bothered him.

Their story was slipping into a horror story and Shiro couldn’t seem to drag the feeling away from that downward spiral inside of himself.

Shiro frowned tight and shook his head.  He didn’t know what to do either.

The third man, sitting up where he’d somehow been tossed free or climbed free or  - who knew - was one of them.  He had their face.  But there was a foreign scar over the bridge of his nose, like a burn, skin thin looking and discolored and his bangs were white against his otherwise dark hair.  

The real horror though -

the real horror was his arm.  

Shiro found himself both fascinated and horrified by it and kept trying to look at it without having to look at it.  This twin’s arm was gone, ruined just below the elbow and it wasn’t damage caused by the fall.   There was no blood, not beyond the usual you’d expected as least, surrounded by so much fallen glass and metal.

There were wires - 

dangling - 

There were wires dangling from what was left of the missing arm.  Embedding wires, pushing out of the space pale skin like slick purple worms.  The stump itself was sealed off, wrapped in some kind of metal that had burn scar tissue around it and Shiro’s own right arm felt the imaginary pain.  He kept unconsciously flexing his right hand, just to feel his fingers moving.  Wires hung from the metal that covered the stranger’s stump as well but it was the wires above it, coming out of his skin -   
  
Shiro realized he’d been starring and squeezed his eyes tightly shut for a minute, face contorting, too emotional to hide it out of politeness and then he swallowed and opened his eyes to look at his twin’s face.  The twin that still had both arms.  He shook his head again.

“I don’t know.”

Because the man with the missing arm, the mirror of both of them but damaged in strange ways - was unresponsive.  He was sitting up.  He was breathing.   He’d flinched once or twice, when metal had broken apart nearby and fallen after landing haphazardly.  But his eyes had never focused on them and if he heard them at all there was no indication on his face.  Shiro had looked directly into his eyes and had seen absolutely nothing - no one - looking back at him.     
  
The other man’s hair was a big longer than theirs, a grow out of their neat military cut that had almost reached his jawline.  They’d checked through it all the same, once they’d worked themselves up to touch him and he’d stayed just as lax and unresponsive while they had.  There had been no head wounds they could find.  Nothing that seemed to make the other man flinch or react when touched.  If there was a wound, without any medical equipment, neither Shiro nor his twin could find it.  There was just - nothing there.  Nothing there in front of them except a body.  Their body.  But their body without any indication that someone like them was in it.  Shiro dropped down to rest on his heels next to his twin, needing the comfort of nearness and his twin hunched his shoulders forward a little as if it brought him closer to Shiro as well.    
  
“We can’t leave him,” Shiro stated it and his twin next to him nodded.

Abandonment had never been a question.  

But that didn’t leave them with only one option and they were both reluctant to name the one that didn’t involve bringing the empty body with them.

His twin turned his head so Shiro could see his lips.

“It could be shock.”

“Could be,” Shiro agreed and then cleared his throat because whether he could hear himself or not, his voice had felt thin to him.  He nodded to make up for it.

Seeing himself, vacant and empty, was eerie.  Disconcerting.  He kept waiting for the other body to suddenly blink and look at them both with someone that wasn’t them, someone ‘else’, looking back out of the eyes just before he attacked.   Shiro had never been a fan of horror movies but now he wished he’d seen far fewer than the few he actually had watched.  His twin shifted on his heels and there was suddenly a shoulder resting, warm and steady against his.  He leaned back to return the favor.

“We bring him.”  His twin decided.  Or rather simply, finally, voiced what they both knew their only real choice was.  Shiro nodded.  Suddenly cracked a small, dry smile.

“Worse comes to worse, at least we’ll all starve together.“

"It won’t come to that,” his twin stood first and offered a hand to help him up that he needed morally more than physically.  His twin’s smile was thin and tight, completely stripped of humor.

“We’ll eat each other before it comes to that.”

Shiro snorted - 

but he didn’t let go of his twin’s hand right away either.

Astronauts were really just sailors in a larger sea - 

and history was littered with sailors that had turned to the only food source available trapped on a life boat with no land in sight.  

…..

There was no food on this planet, at least none that they’d found in their wandering.  No plants, no animals.  Just metal.  Broken glass.

And hundreds of their own dead bodies.

He suddenly understood why no one liked his dark sense of humor during morbid times.

There was no hope in it.

“Come on,” he tugged his twin’s hand, gave it a squeeze before moving over to the sitting body in front of them.  "Let’s see if he can walk on his own.“

Between the two of them they got the third one on his feet.  There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his legs at least and once his body was upright it stayed that way without their support.  Moving him was another story but with a bit of practice they found that the body would walk on its own if they did as well and so they started forward, one under each arm, boots moving too much in tandem for Shiro’s liking.  To distract himself from the knowledge there were now three of him, all mirrors in a circle of each other, he turned his head to look at his twin.  

"He needs a name.”

Whether his twin had been thinking the same or simply made the mental jump easily given their brains worked the same way, his first comment wasn’t 'what?’.

“Fido?”

Shiro snorted and shifted the arm across his shoulders as they walked.  It was limp.  Not at all the reassuring weight of his twin’s and he noticed that he’d already divided them.  There was his twin - and there was - Other.  And Other was not a part of what he and his twin were.  He wondered if he was starting to go mad and if he cared.

“Yurei?”

His twin shot him a narrow look and Shiro shrugged.

“Too dark?”

“Too close,” his twin mouthed at him and Shiro exhaled.  Felt the cold down through him.  He could avoid acknowledging it for the most part but the truth of the matter was - they might as well all be ghosts.  For all he knew he’d died and this was one of the hells souls found themselves trapped in.  He’d never been much for religion, any religion, too caught in the stars but he’d always had the niggling feeling in the back of his head that there was More.  That if the universe were full of dark matter, gravity wells, black holes and so many powerful forces that couldn’t be seen with the human eye - 

who was to say there wasn’t the same on Earth?  So much more than human science could measure, speculative theory, felt via its influence over its actual presence.  Usually his life was too busy, too full, for that kind of deep navel gazing but - 

it was hard not to think about those half formed thoughts now.  Here. 

Surrounded by what couldn’t be possible.  

Walking triplicate across a dead moon surrounded by his own deaths.

“Maybe we can just go with Fred?” he was avoiding and he knew it and thought it was the only sane thing to do.

His twin started to laugh.  Soundless to Shiro but he could see it moving through the other man and feel the vibrations of it through the body they were both supporting.

“Damn,” his twin managed.  "We are fuckin’ uncreative, aren’t we?“

Before he realized it, Shiro was laughing too.

"God. We are,” he managed but - it felt good.  It felt really good and even the fact he couldn’t hear it didn’t steal the relief of the shared laughter entirely away from him.

They both laughed longer than was called for and maybe that wasn’t entirely sane either - but it felt important.

By the time they stopped laughing, they were closer to their goal and somehow it was easier to deal with the empty body of themselves walking between them.

When they’d reached ground level, finally found their way off the mountain completely, they’d been left with the question of where to go.  Sitting down and camping where they had been hadn’t had any draw when they both knew, without saying so, that no one was coming to get them.  So it had simply been a matter of picking which direction to start walking.   They’d finally settled on a large silhouette in the distance.  Something that looked like a large piece of whatever had fallen from the sky and had hit with enough impact to embed itself upright, like some crooked broken sky scraper.  The logical reasoning behind heading that direction had been that if it was that big maybe something they could use might have survived on it.  Everything else smaller had been obliterated and scattered into pieces on impact with the planet they were on but - if there was anything to find - chances were high the fallen skyscraper might be their best shot at it.  Shiro wasn’t hoping for a space ship out of here, as nice as that would have been.  He was hoping for some kind of liquid they could drink.  Something to tell them what had happened would be nice too.  But he would have given his right arm - 

the thought stopped as he snuck a look at the body between them and the ruin of the arm that hung over his twin’s shoulder and decided he needed a new price he’d be willing to pay for off-handed thoughts.

As they drew closer, the sky scraper got larger, starting to blot out the horizon with its broken black form, like some kind of nightmare castle out of a children’s cartoon.  

“We might not be the only ones headed there,” he finally said and then turned his head so he could watch his twin’s face.  Which was already settling into something tighter and harder angled before eyes that matched his own turned to look at him.

“I thought of that too. But we’re going to die if we stay here.  If its more of us - ?” the same uncomfortable desire to avoid and yet not moved over his face that Shiro felt on his own and he shook his head seconds before his twin did.  "Then its more of us.  If its someone else - “ a shrug.  "We either get killed or maybe they help us.”

“Or we make them help us,” Shiro stated flatly and felt the surge through him. He wasn’t violent by nature but - for himself - 

for his twin - 

he thought he could learn to be.  

His twin grinned at him but it was all teeth and wasn’t humor.  

Shiro grinned back the same way.

There didn’t seem to be a sun here - or at least not one close enough to make a difference and the sky stayed an eternal twilight thanks to the ruined moon overhead so Shiro had no sense of day or night, no passage of time.  But his legs were starting to get tired by the time they approached what he was starting to think of as the Dark Tower and he thought it must have easily been hours. They were more carrying than guiding the middle version of them by that point as well and his head had lolled forward long ago.  But he was still breathing and Shiro thought that would be enough for now.

As one, he and his twin came to a stop on the edge of the impact crater the Dark Tower rose out of the center of.  The ground leading up to it was awash in fallen shards of the station everything must have come from.  And the tubes. There were always the tubes.  Here they were even more concentrated than they had been and Shiro suspected this must be a central hub or spoke or support of whatever had once hung around the ruined moon overhead. 

“What do we do with - Fred?” he asked and the question was more 'do we take him with us?’ than anything.  His twin flattened his lips and looked around the ruined area but Shiro spotted the small indentation in a nearby piece of wreckage that almost formed a cave first.

“There.”

If there was anyone - or anything - ahead, they’d stand a better chance facing it unencumbered and, hollow or not, the wounded version of them should be safer here than brought along.  Between the two of them they got the body seated again and resting with its back against the interior of the wreck.  His twin stepped back but Shiro hesitated a moment.  As far as he could tell, the third twin was sleeping.  Or passed out.  Or shutting down.  He rested his hand on the healthy shoulder all the same and gave a firm squeeze.

“Stay.  Stay here,” he instructed pointlessly.  "Don’t leave.  Stay put.“

There was no response but he hadn’t expected there to be.  He backed up and straightened to find his twin looking at him with a slightly puzzled look.

"I didn’t think to do that,” his twin simply said and Shiro wasn’t sure if that was reassuring or not.   Reaching up he caught his twin’s shoulder with the same hand and got to feel the muscles move under his fingers this time as his twin returned the gesture.  Then he gestured over his shoulder at the Dark Tower with a thumb.

“Shall we go knock?” 

His twin smiled back at him and it was the smile with all the teeth.

“Like a wrecking ball.”


	5. Chapter 5

The quiet was eerie.

Of course it would always be eerie but outside - outside he’d managed to convince himself that he was simply on a planet without atmosphere to carry sound.  Yes, he’d been lacking a helmet but somehow being outside in an alien environment and not hearing things had been - acceptable to his mind.   Things had been strange enough that he could pretend it wasn’t his ears that were wrong, it was the world around him that was just operating by its own principles.    
  
Being inside the giant broken structure was still alien.  But his mind registered it as ‘inside’ and told him that he should be able to hear the hollow tinny sound of enclosed space.  That he should be able to hear footsteps - his and his twin’s. That they’re somewhere with air and so he should be able to hear.

And because of that, the complete silence was so much worse and harder to ignore than it was outside.

It got to the point that he actually found himself reaching up and wiggling a finger in his ear, as if he could unclog it somehow and let noise back into his world.  The realization that whatever was wrong with him might be permanent was a giant, rising wave of panic inside of him, that he had to ignore so that it didn’t hit and overwhelm him.  He hummed to himself, could feel the vibration but it wasn’t the right 'noise’, not the one his brain told him the sound that _should_ be and he stopped quickly.  His twin, in front of him, looked back briefly at him but Shiro shook his head and the other man went back to picking his way forward.    
  
The interior was even more of a mess than he’d imagined it would be and he wondered how they expected to find anything in here. The floor and walls were all warped by the landing impact and he thought he saw signs of previous explosions in the crushed interior as well.  The upside of the mess was that there were plenty of holes for the low light from the outside moon to leak in through, illuminating just enough for their eyes to adjust.  Which was a mercy, because exploring the place was just as much a matter of crawling along on their hands and knees through low places and scaling large rips in the floor or ceiling as walking upright.  Everything was sharp edges and unexpected brittle areas, unreliable in the moonlight and shadows.  It made their going slow, cautious even by astronaut standards, even before counting the doubling back when things became impassable and circling around.  Shiro was grateful for his innate sense of direction because he was fairly sure he could still feel the way back out of here despite the twists and turns they’d taken.  Getting lost or trapped in this place of black metal and cold dead wires had no appeal and he’d already lost track of time and how long they’ve been in here.  He still wasn’t hungry - he’d always had a hard time remembering to eat when he was stressed or nervous but the thirst was a slowly growing need in his throat and mind, getting harder and harder to ignore.  The dread of the realization that eventually he wouldn’t be able to push it aside and ignore it any more was almost worse than the realization that lack of water was a death sentence.  One he could accept and ignore until it was time to deal with.  The other wasn’t going to go away for much longer.  

It brought his mind back to Fred, a quick check of personal responsibility for a teammate that was down and relying on them.  He hoped the other man had stayed put.  That whatever energy had gotten him out of his tube alive hadn’t come back to send him wandering the wasteland.  Or worse, coming inside and getting lost in here.  He noted the worry but didn’t focus on it.  He couldn’t do anything about Fred right now.  Right now he needed to concentrate on the ruins of what had obviously once been a space station of some kind and a very stripped down one at that.  He had to find a way to make use of it.  Their survival depended on it considering nothing else on the moon provided any hope.  So far they haven’t found any crew’s quarters or  mess halls or rec rooms or even anything that looks like a command room or computer terminals - if aliens even had computers that were recognizable to him.  He thought he remembered consoles at least from his brief memory of his capture but things were still hazy and unreliable in his mind.  

Shiro realized, somewhere in the back of his mind where he was working over things to distract himself from panic and fear and worry, that it was possible he was dead.  Edging around a tangle of hanging, still wires that gutted down from a rip in the ceiling above it was hard to avoid the thought.  Everything was so alien, so tinged with a feeling of unrealness and the lack of ability to hear the solid ‘sound’ of the place around him didn’t help.  It was possible he was dead.  That he’d died and this was some kind of punishment or purgatory.  Eternally combing a dead alien landscape with nothing but other versions of himself to meet in his travels.  Never going anywhere, never coming back to anywhere. Just endless wandering, ghosts of himself and a growing thirst -   
  
except he didn’t believe it, not really.  He couldn’t even pretend he did or that he’d find comfort in that fantasy.  It wasn’t because he didn’t believe there could be something more after death.

It was because, as strange as this entire situation was - it felt too much like his life to be his death.  It might not make sense if he said it outloud but, in his mind, his life had always been about trying to find his way forward around problems he had never expected to run into.  So the fact he was on an alien planet in the ruin of an impossible ship didn’t really change all that much of the basic principle of the thing.    
  
Ahead of him, his twin held up a hand and Shiro froze in response.  He hadn’t noticed any changes - but he was also chaffingly aware his ability to pick up on things was limited thanks to his missing hearing.  Now he stayed still, trying to keep his breathing silent, eyes straining in the dim light to try to pick up anything unusual or that will give him a hint of why his twin stopped.  A glance behind showed nothing as well, but he could feel the creep up his back, ancient fear of being hunted alive even on a moon full of nothing but his own dead bodies.  Looking back, he saw that his twin had gone down into a crouch and he followed the example, following as well as the other man crept forward.  Trying to move quietly and only hoping that he was.  His twin stopped at the next gaping wound in the floor of the structure, settled down on his heels and Shiro joined him, angled himself so that he could keep an eye on the area of the passage that his twin couldn’t and then turned his head to look at the other man.  It just seemed natural for them to end up with their shoulders pressed against each others as they discussed.

'Discussed’.

His twin tugged on his own ear lobe and Shiro nodded.  It was what he’d suspected.  The other man had heard something, and he hated, with a sudden intensity that surprised him, that he couldn’t hear as well.  Because it put limits on him and he was so damned tired of limits but he was especially tired of limits that were probably going to get him killed one day.  He banked it down almost as soon as it flared though.  Now wasn’t the time for that.  Never was the time for that.  Already his twin was pointing downward and then gesturing to a gap in the floor ahead of them.   A sharp thumbs down followed, hard with one hand.  Shiro was pretty sure he’d understood the gist of that.  Whatever the noise was, it was somewhere below the level they were on and it wasn’t a positive type of sound.  Though, honestly, Shiro had a hard time imagining what a positive sound would be in a place like this.  He nodded to show he understood and then walked his own fingers along the ground, paused and looked up at his twin to cock his head in question.  Traded out two walking fingers for four and then glanced upward again.  His twin’s eyes were narrowed, face tight as he ‘listened’ to the question.  He shook his head almost immediately in answer - and then made a face and shrugged.  With one finger in the air, he tapped out an unsteady beat, head tipped, eyes shut.  After a moment, Shiro understood.  Whatever his twin was hearing it was fairly regular - but not regular enough to have the pattern a programmed signal would.  

So it was probably a machine - but maybe it wasn’t.

Helpful.

Shiro nudged his shoulder where it was against his twin’s.  Something in the beat of that finger had his chest feeling tight.  Had his own finger wanting to tap out a rhythm as well.  It wasn’t a good feeling but he had no idea why.  His twin stopped marking off the sound he heard and looked at him.  Leaned a little into his shoulder.  Offered a small, tight smile that Shiro was relieved to return.  

Whatever it was - they were in this together.  They’d started together and Shiro was going to do his damnest to make sure they ended that way too.  A nod that was returned and then together, they crept their way to the edge of the gap and looked down.  Twisted metal and dangling wires that all slanted or hung downward. And then shadows and darkness beyond that.  Together they crouched there for a long moment, shoulder to shoulder again.  And Shiro knew his twin was dealing with the same thing he was.  It wasn’t how to get down a level.  

It was did they really want to?

They’d come here to find answers.  Or to at least add to the puzzle they already had.  The twin’s unsteady sound was the closest they’d come so far to anything useful.  Of course they would go check out.    
  
There was still a natural hesitation that said they’d both simply rather not.  Every surprise this place had given them so far had been horrifying and you could only do that so many times before your mind started trying to keep any more horrifying things from showing up.  Paused on the edge of the gap, Shiro realized they were both coming up on that place inside themselves.  When enough would finally be enough.

Except he knew from experience that the world didn’t stop dumping things on top of you just because you felt you couldn’t take any more.

So he shifted. Curled his hand around the metal lip, trying to find a good place to grip it that will both support him and not slice his hands open. His twin moved a few seconds later, working his way around to the other side of the hole and doing the same.  They were going down and of course they were going down together.  Sensibly one of the should stay up here.   In case…..   
  
but realistically there was no way one of them was going to stay behind.  

Shiro wouldn’t even be able to hear it if his twin cried out or screamed once he was out of sight, to know to try to help.  

So they were going in together and if something bad happened -   
  
well, at least neither of them would be alone for it.  Somehow that seemed more important than survival.

Besides, what was the worst that could happen?  They could die?    
  
As if that wasn’t going to happen to them already, stranded here on an alien moon with no food or water or way off.  Shiro wasn’t in a hurry to die - but it wasn’t exactly as if he was terrified of it either.  He’d known he was going to die for years now.  Going out on an alien planet in deep space wasn’t the worst way to have it happen.

Pale flickered out of the edges of his eyes and he lifted them to see the wave of his twin’s palm.  Nodded.  He’d found a handhold as well and what he thought might be a few more further down.  His twin held his eyes for a long moment and Shiro didn’t have to hear anything to know.  It surprised him, the way it pulled a smile out of him and he let it turn into a grin, more teeth than joy, something fierce and wolfish but not devoid of enjoyment.  Let it come. Whatever it was - let it come.   They were Shiroganes and they didn’t go down without causing a hell of a lot of damage.  His twin smirked back at him, catching the mood and together they both turned and started the slow process of lowering themselves down through the broken metal tear in the floor.    
  
Shiro wasn’t sure how quiet they were about it.  He tried but most of his concentration was on the climb downward.  Nothing in this place was clean cut. Everything was torn and sloppy and broken and the tear in the floor was buckled metal and torn wires and tubing.  It gave him passable hand and footholds, but he had to take it slow and test each one before he would trust his body weight to it, never letting go of one hold until he was sure the other would hold him.  If he was lucky, if they were both lucky, the ruined floor would go all the way down to the next level.  The height of the corridors they’ve explored through fluctuate, for cargo passage verse just crew, he’d guess.  He hoped that the level below was just for crew.  

He wasn’t that lucky.

Shiro had worked himself as low down on the broken metal overhang as he could but eventually he ran out of anything to hold onto, the wires and metal of the floor above ending and nothing but the same gaping hole still below.  At this angle if there was any moonlight, it didn’t help him see anything.  Across the divide he could barely make out his twin, a little higher up on the other side and also out of anything to climb down.  Below was still lost in shadows but Shiro didn’t think it could be that much further down to the next floor.

Probably.

There was only one way to find out and he took it in a heartbeat, before his twin could think to, pushing off and out into freefall.    
  
For a second

reality shifts.

And he’s just jumped off a rented boat in full gear, about to splash down into the black water of a night dive.  For just a second he’s doing his airdrop training, ticking seconds on his meter as he falls through the night sky to the moment he pulls his parachute tab.    
  
For just a second he’s weightless and its his first time in orbit around the Earth, spinning slowly as the world passes by outside the view windows below him.    
  
And then his feet impacted with something solid and memory sensations gave way to reality again, and thank God, not shards of metal, and he rolled with the momentum to absorb the landing, coming to his feet smoothly enough to surprise himself.  The light was even weaker here but his first action was to check the floor and make sure there were no shards of metal or dangerous objects pointing upward, no wires to catch someone’s throat in free fall.  He turned his head to glance, caught something from the edges of his vision and turned to face it.

There was light, faint and barely there, spilled down the hallway.

It was purple.

Something in his stomach clenched up hard, ran a sick fever feeling down his spine.  He clamped his jaw tight, squinted his eyes against the feeling, not sure where it was coming from but feeling the vertigo it sends spiralling out through him.  There was an impact through the soles of his boots, sharp and sudden, enough to rock him.  Enough to break him out of the caught not-memory.  He turned and his twin was rolling to his feet nearby.  

The other man’s movements were too practiced.  Too smooth.

His twin’s scowling face wiped the brief thought from Shiro’s mind as the other man marched over and Shiro found himself smiling back in response to the scowl.  His twin’s eyes narrowed even more but a second later there was a resisted tick at the corner of his mouth as well.  Shiro raised his eyebrows, a 'you would have if I hadn’t’ look.  His twin responded with a look that could only be summarizes as a 'you’re a shit’ eye glare.  Somehow - it maked things all right again.

But their landing had to have made noise and the second they were both sure the other was in one piece and unhurt, they took opposite sides of the wall, sticking close to them.  The silence was overwhelming and Shiro wished that was reassuring.  It was only his own silence though and so there was no comfort in it at all. 

Ahead the dim purple light continued to be a _kitsune-bi_.

He wanted to ask his twin if it the light made him feel sick as well but Shiro wasn’t in the mood to mime it and in the end it didn’t really matter.  It was where they were going.  He didn’t need to hear sound to know that.  Light took precedence over noise.  His twin stood still for a long time, tight - and then he exhaled.  Nodded and looked back at Shiro.  Raised a finger and tapped out an uneven beat again.  A chin lift indicated it came from the same direction the light did.  Together they started down their sides of the hall.

The hallway curved slowly, which explained the lack of real feel for how far away the light was and Shiro was on the outside curve, his twin closer in.  The closer they got, the brighter the still dim light got, the more Shiro noticed the walls and floor in this area seemed to have held up better than what they’ve been crawling through.  It must have been an important area, if it was reinforced like this.  A command center or an engine core or maybe, Shiro let himself hope and knew he shouldn’t, a hanger.  Whatever it was, if it had held up like this, it meant it was important. Which meant, hopefully, intel but also - anyone that had been on this structure when it had crashed probably knew about it as well.  And the logical place to head, was this way.  Maybe the noise his twin had heard, that his twin was still absently moving his index finger to mark off, was mechanical.  But there was a good possibility it wasn’t as well.  Sometimes it was a comfort to think the same way.  Shiro didn’t have to point potential dangers out to his companion.

The curve of the hallway brought them right to the buckled ruins of what looked like a crash door to Shiro.  The purple lighting was still dim - and it still made his stomach feel cold and sick - but it was clear enough to see by now and it was coming through the holes in the door where the metal had pulled away and left gaps.  Without a word both he and his twin sank down into crouches on either side of the ruined door.  His twin’s finger continued its unsteady beat.

This was it then.  This was where the noise was coming from.  Where it was still coming from.

Either some left over program still running, some mechanical routinee still in place  
  
Or it was someone that was still alive.

Shiro wished he could hear what the noise was, if only so that he could at least guess and pretend that helped.

It could be another of him.  He was aware of that.  This moon was full of dead bodies that looked like him.  And at least two others that weren’t dead.   Except he didn’t believe for even a moment that he and the others were the original crew of this place.  Something - someone else had been in charge of this place full of tubes of him where the lighting made him break out in chills.  And he couldn’t think of a single reason that whoever that was would have good intentions when it came to him and his team.  He stole a quick peek into the room through a gap in the door.  It wasn’t a large space, maybe less than half the size of a class room back at the Garrison and it was cluttered with fallen and broken rubble.  In the very center of it, a giant metal spine dropped down from the ceiling and into the floor and Shiro couldn’t tell if that was a part of the room or a new addition.  The far wall was cracked screens that reflected nothing back from their dark surface.  He thought, as he ducked back, that it must have been some kind of control room.

He hadn’t seen any tubes like the one he’d been in when he’d fallen and that littered the world outside.

His twin held up a hand across the gap from him and it was a very obvious 'stay put’ gesture.  It had Shiro narrowing his eyes - but he nodded all the same. There was a noise in the room and Shiro couldn’t hear it.  His twin could.  He didn’t have to like it - but he wasn’t going to be stupid about it either.

His twin nodded back - and flashed a quick grin - doing stupid shit was apparently a trait all of them shared and his twin knew it - and his twin was through the gap. Shiro gave him a count of two seconds before he followed him through and swung his body to the other side, taking back up position, his back flat against the wall next to the door, crouched low.  Wishing he had a rifle or anything at all beyond one automatically clenched fist.

He didn’t have time to worry about it for long.  His twin had already been moving, following the wall close, circling around, but he was only a few steps in before he was diving for cover and Shiro actually smelled the blaster bolt that shot past and impacted in the space his twin had just been in.  The noise was a someone.  Alive and hostile.  

Shiro moved before he really thought about it, hurtling a fallen control panel in the opposite direction his twin was moving in, realizing, somewhere analytical and removed in the back of his mind that his body had taken that too easily, had cleared it by too much height.  There wasn’t time to do more than distantly notice that however.  The bursts of light were still blazing from behind the pillar and his twin was still dodging them, quickly pinned down behind one of the bulkier consoles.  By that time however, Shiro was already around the other side, taking his momentum to launch himself into the air, pushing off a broken chunk of the wall to get himself airborn and gaining extra height from a rebound off the column in the center of the room.  The air smelled like ozone, the flash from the blast bolts wrecking havoc with his vision against dimmer purple interior.  His heart was loud in his head and somewhere, very far away, he could have sworn he heard waves.  No.  It was a crowd.  Cheering.  

He came in hard and fast with a snarl.  Dropped down from above on the figure sprawled out on the ground, sight narrowed down to the very obvious gun in it’s hand.  It was too large, built too big.  A very clean ‘Not Him’ in the purple light and the pulse thundered in ears, all the pent up panic and frustration and rage and fear of this entire mad situation funneled down into his body.  He can down on his knee, hard, and he landed that knee right where, in a human opponent, the bone would have been closest to the surface of the arm extended to aim the weapon’s blasts at his twin.  It broke under the impact of his landing and he felt it up through his leg.  Felt the scream that must have gone with the action through his body.  Ignored it to close his hands hard on the gun and wrench it clear.  The momentum of wrenching the gun loose turned into a spin that let him put the muzzle of the thing right up against the gut of the being as he pivoted on his knee and -

and he only stopped himself from automatically pulling the trigger at the last possible second, suddenly freezing up as what he’d done - and what he’d almost done - caught up to him.  The arm still pinned under him was writhing but the being it was attached to had gone very still the second the gun’s muzzle was against it.  Before Shiro had time to really focus on the situation beyond what his instincts had told him to do, his Shiro’s twin dropped in next to him and pressed a foot down on the hand attached to the broken arm.  Feeling a little unsteady, Shiro took the opportunity to rise to his feet.  But the muzzle of the weapon never shifted off target or wavered.  Already his heart was starting to steady and that was perhaps the most alarming thing of all.  The creature looked up at them both defiantly from its prone position.  Shiro looked back and willed the creature to be familiar.

The only thing familiar were the yellow eyes in the unfamiliar purple face. 

Familiar yellow eyes that looked furious - but not at all surprised to see two identical twins standing over it. 


	6. Chapter 6

“He says we should be dead.”

“Did you tell him the feeling’s mutual?” Shiro asked, voice feeling rough in his throat even if he couldn’t hear it.  It occurred to him, belatedly, that the Galra could probably understand him but he realized he didn’t care.  And it wasn’t entirely the Galra’s fault.

Shiro couldn’t understand what the Galra was saying.

He couldn’t hear it but that wasn’t the problem.  Or it was the problem, the real problem, but one that Shiro had expected to be able to work around.  The problem, the root of his frustration, was that he couldn’t read the Galra’s lips.

In space, you got good at reading lips.  At hearing what was being said just by the movement of someone else’s mouth without sound.  Sure, they had communicators, but despite that, a lot of them got into the habit of just mouthing words to each other, through face plates or windows or across the room.  Sometimes space seemed to swallow sound and maybe it was human nature to follow its lead and respect the silence.

Or maybe it was human nature to not want to draw attention from whatever it was in space that swallowed sound, some left over instinct from the days when they lived in caves and the world was full of giant nebulous things that weren’t understood but could still kill you.  Things you stayed silent for and hoped passed you in the dark without noticing.

His lack of hearing was frightening to him, almost terrifying and heart breaking to handle if he thought about it too much.  So he did his best not to think about it.  And, when he did have to think about it,  he tried to do so in a way that made him feel capable.  Reading lips helped with that.

But he couldn’t read the Galra’s words on his lips and it rubbed raw him inside, reminding him that he was vulnerable.  Something that every instinct in him told him was enough to get him killed.  It was funny - almost.  He’d resisted being seen as weak or needing help thanks to the disease that had slowly tightened its hold on him as he’d grown up but he’d never felt that - that bone deep surety that being seen as weak was going to be his death.  Something, he suspected, he’d picked up since his capture by the Galra and all the things he didn’t remember between then and waking up in a falling test tube.

The Galra was speaking Galra.  And Shiro didn’t know that language.

His twin did apparently, though their brief moment of realization, that the Galra wasn’t speaking English, that his twin understood it all the same, was still a bit of a mystery.  Either a translator implant, most likely since the Galra and Shiro could both understand what the twin was saying, or his twin had, somehow, learned Galra in the time he didn’t remember at all.  Either way, it left Shiro having to play catch up while his twin interrogated the Galra - and he wasn’t enjoying it at all.  His finger, just off the trigger of the gun they’d taken, wanted to curl and tighten and wipe the sign of his weakness away.  Just so that he wouldn’t have to acknowledge it.

Maybe he should be a bit worried about that.  He should be a bit worried about that.  He didn’t remember thinking about killing so easily or with such temptation before, when he remembered who he’d been before his capture.  

It felt like a lifetime ago.  Several lifetimes.

His finger stayed next to the trigger though, didn’t tremble or flinch.  Shiro knew the difference between an instinctive want and necessity.  So instead he watched his twin shoot him a look, half warning, half entire commiseration and go back to his interrogation.  Shiro worried about Fred, left so long outside on his own.

The Galra wasn’t being friendly about this.  But he didn’t seem to be trying to hide either or lie about his answers, so much as simply being angry at having to give them.  Shiro recognized it as someone that had no reason to lie.  After their attack, the Galra had been snarling and condescending but he seemed more ‘trapped dog with its leg caught’ than in an actually hurry to get into a fight with them again, as much furious at the situation as at them for being a part of it.  And he literally was a ‘trapped dog’.  The Galra’s legs were both pinned under fallen rubble and Shiro suspected the sound his twin had heard had been the alien trying to escape.  It hadn’t worked for him before they’d arrived - and he wasn’t in any position to keep trying now.  The Galra cradled his broken arm close to his body but otherwise didn’t try to move much.  Shiro did notice that he kept looking at their arms, their hands, as if he was watching for something to materialize.  Shiro made sure the gun was very visible whenever the reptilian eyes glanced in his direction.  They needed food and water and they needed, ultimately, a way off this dead planet with its graveyard of their own bodies on it.  But, even more, they needed answers.  Why they were here

And why there was more than one of them.

His twin, and Shiro realized he was going to need to come up with a name for the man eventually even if taking the name ‘Shiro’ for himself, even only mentally, seemed selfish, was the one harrying at the answer, picking it out of the Galra’s snarled responses like someone picking through a fish for bones.  They’d been at if for a while.  Shiro shifted his legs where he was sitting, back against the wreckage of the room, not able to catch everything since his twin wasn’t facing him as he did it, concentrating on keeping the barrel of the gun steady.  You didn’t point a weapon anywhere but where you intended to shoot.  Shiro had it pointed between the eyes of the Galra.  And yet, when his twin suddenly spun about and mouthed:

“Shoot him,” at him, Shiro blinked and hesitated.

“What?”

“Shoot - no.  Don’t.  I’m sorry,” his twin ran his hands over his face and - grey.  Shiro thought the other man looked grey at the edges suddenly, in the fickle light of the room.  He focused on the Galra almost immediately afterward, warning against trying anything but whatever the Galra had said, was still saying, Shiro realized as he watched the mouth continue moving even with his twin’s back turned, his twin was looking - sick?

Sick.  Like he wanted to throw up.  Just for a second, enough to have Shiro really deeply worried now instead of nebulously worried - and then the Galra said something, smiled when it did, and his twin turned around and roared something at the alien in response.  It had Shiro’s eyes going a little wider, the complete lack of sound somehow making the fury on his mirror image’s face that much clearer.  It sent the nausea though Shiro’s own chest, realizing his own face could look that terrifying.

Wondering how many times in the past it had and he hadn’t realized it.

“Ask him about supplies,” he made sure he kept his voice steady and level even if he couldn’t hear it himself.  He knew this, knew how to take over a situation when others needed him to step in.  Knew how to focus someone else, how to bring them back from whatever emotion they were going through - usually fear because it was usually during an emergency in the emptiness of space.  And he watched his twin respond.  Watched the other man pull back, breathing hard, chest rising and falling too fast, fists clenched.  Shaking, Shiro realized and pushed down the almost now habitual urge to go stand shoulder pressed to shoulder next to him.  Instead he kept his gun steady on the grinning Galra.  

“You understand me,” his voice was mild.  He knew how to control it - knew that his twin knew how to control it too and the seeping fear that something had happened to completely destroy that control was cold down through his spine.  He focused on the Galra.  Gave his brother time to get it under control again.  “We need food and water.  A way out of here, off this planet.  You have the first two or you wouldn’t be here.  You’ll help us get the third if its not already here.  After we’re off this planet, we’ll drop you off wherever you want to be.”

His twin turned abruptly, hissed something at him, but hisses weren’t easy to lip read and Shiro met his eyes for a long moment and then looked back at the prisoner.  Who was looking back at him, not leering now.  He said something Shiro couldn’t understand and Shiro caught the way his twin stiffened and then turned back to him.  Started talking again though Shiro could tell, from the way his back and shoulders jerked, that the conversation was more snapped out words now than the flow it had been before.  

The feeling that his twin had gotten their answers - and that it was vile inside of him - had the curling vine nerves in Shiro’s own stomach writhing uncomfortably.  

He would have given a great deal to be able to hear.

The Galra shot him several more looks even if he was talking to his brother again and they weren’t at the gun so much this time.  Shiro couldn’t read the alien face well, but it seemed like speculation and that made his skin crawl.  As if he was being weighed for his usefulness.  He’d had it happen on Earth too, judged based on what he could offer whatever commanding officer was choosing people for a mission but something about it in yellow eyes had a small, dark part of him curling up and screaming in mindless terror and he didn’t know why.  He shifted his shoulders back a little more securely into the mound of rubble he was sitting leaned against and let his face reflect stone.

Realized, belated, how very badly he just wanted to go home.

Home.

How would his mother react to finding out she had three sons now?

How much incense would she need to burn for all the ‘sons’ littering this dead planet that would never come home?

His twin finally turned away from the Galra, came and dropped unexpectedly to sit next to him.  Immediately leaned, even more unexpectedly, against him, shoulder pressed so hard to his shoulder that Shiro had to change the way he was balancing the gun to keep it from getting shifted.  The physical touch wasn’t surprising - it was a habit between them by now - but it was the fact that his brother would do it in front of the alien, show that kind of vulnerability - that surprised Shiro.  And rolled hard against what was inside of him that belled with how dangerous showing any kind of ‘weakness’ was.  

He still kept his spot and leaned into his brother in return, both of their matched faces looking ahead at the Galra with different thoughts flowing behind their identical eyes.  Finally his twin tapped his leg.  Sat back up with an inhale and nodded, face settled into calm again.  Shiro wasn’t sure what had happened, and the cold dread of whatever it was hadn’t left him, but he nodded in response, turned his head to look as his twin nudged him lightly.

“Go get Fred.  Bring him back here.  I’ll watch the Galra until you both come back.  Then you can watch him and I’ll go get food and water.  I know where they are now.”

“Are there others, like him?” Shiro didn’t like the idea of splitting up.  He didn’t like it for tactical purposes - but he didn’t like it for much more human and mortal ones.  Right now the world was a very empty and wind swept place, without even sound to offer comfort.  His brother shook his head.  Shrugged a shoulder after a moment.  Gestured toward their prisoner that was watching them both through narrow eyes.

“He says no.  So yes.  Or there were.  I think if they could, they’d be here already.”

Shiro passed over the weapon and his twin took it without disagreement.  If there were Galra around, it was possible Shiro might run into them on the way back.  But they hadn’t passed anyone on their long way in.  If there was anyone alive, he tended to agree with his twin’s assessment.  They would come here.  A command center of some sort.  The hope of communication with the outside universe.  So far no one had and the only Galra was the trapped one.  But it was more likely anyone still alive would find his twin than him if his twin stayed put.  He didn’t like it - but he didn’t like leaving Fred outside either.  He leaned forward, put his forehead to his brother’s and rested a hand on his shoulder for a long minute.  His twin leaned as well and he felt the steady hand on his own shoulder in return.  Then without another word, he stood up and, ignoring the Galra prisoner, left the ruined room and the sick purple light behind him.

Stepping back out into the hallway ruined his vision.  Even with the faint glow behind him, the dark was suddenly so much darker.  Careful, going by memory as much as sight, one hand on the wall, he found his way backward toward where they’d started, eyes slowly adjusting to the moonlight and darkness as he went.  Relieved for that.  Without sound, sight was his main defense and asset.  If he lost that….  

Going back up a level was impossible, at least with the way they’d come down, but he had a good sense of direction and he angled himself back toward their entry point, knowing that, as completely crushed as this base was, there would be more than one hole in it leading to the outside world.  Careful, around every corner, he kept expecting to see more Galra.

He didn’t.

When he finally found a rip in the outer wall large enough for him to fit through he did, taking a drop that was a bit more than he would have liked but with enough light from the overhead ruined moon to know that the fall would be clear.

His body absorbed the impact and rolled him easily to his feet.  Again - too easily.  Something was different about his body.  It felt - better.  Dehydrated and sick and cold and still - better than he’d felt in longer than he could remember.

Something else to ask their prisoner - if he was still alive when Shiro got back.  He wasn’t unaware of his twin alone with a gun and obvious motivate even if he didn’t understand it.

He should probably feel more guilty about that than he did.  

Pushing it aside for the moment, he circled his way back around to where they’d left Fred, keeping an eye on the outside of the ruined station for easy ways to get back in at that lower level, fairly sure, no matter what his and his twin’s bodies were doing, Fred’s wasn’t up to that kind of effort.  Which was why he wasn’t paying the attention he should have been when he came around the edge of one of the fallen struts of the place.

The heavy weight of a body slamming into his and sending him face first into the hard ground caught him entirely off guard and he went down without a sound.


	7. Chapter 7

Inside his head the crowd was screaming.

He tasted blood where he’d hit the ground, a tooth cut to the inside of his cheek or his tongue and the metal taste of it sent something surging through him.  It wasn’t rage and it wasn’t panic and it wasn’t terror but it tasted like all three of them melted down into something much more basic.  More primal.  Weight pinned him down to the hard packed ground, a rough hand wrenched his arm backward

And the crowds kept screaming.

They saw blood.  They knew it was time for the kill.

That - whatever emotion it was - raced through Shiro’s system like klaxons on an exploding star ship and he heaved hard, ignored the pain, ignored the impossibility of movement, ignored the fact it threatened to break his arm or wrench it out of its socket.  All he knew was the sound of the crowd in his ears meant that someone was going to die now, __right now__ , and he would not - __would not__  - let it be him.

The weight slipped where it was against his back and he used that second of traction, that second of a chance in hell, bucking and rolling with it, other arm coming up and around to twist himself off the ground, off his stomach, abandoning his trapped arm to destruction if that was what was necessary.  There were worse things than dying - and if he found out about them today, he found out about them.  Because he was __not__  going to die.  

He felt the impact near him, a body hitting the ground, felt when the grip on him tore loose and he kept rolling until he was on his feet again, crouching low, teeth bared, survival pounding behind his eyes and in his ears like a drum beat.  The arm that had been trapped, his right arm, was on fire but he could still force it to move so he did, bringing it up defensively in front of him, shifting automatically to try to put some kind of cover near his back, left arm raised for attack, feet shifting, legs bracing for a charge.  

In his ears the crowd was on its feet, blood thirsty and mad with it, calling a name he could almost hear.

Across from him, already on their feet and in a position that mirrored his own

He saw himself.

Again.

And behind that twin were two others.

Things slipped to the side inside of him then, cracked a little.  It was one thing to see his own face regularly when he was used to it but - seeing himself unexpectedly

It felt like walking into your bathroom in the dark of night and seeing your reflection standing on your side of the mirror.

Terrifying and yet so obviously impossible it couldn’t be real and, even already having seen what he’d seen, it took his mind a few thick seconds to catch up.

A few thick seconds to realize the need to kill, to put down, to _ _hurt__ , wasn’t necessarily a part of this.

The other him that had attacked didn’t charge in those seconds of opportunity and Shiro shifted his hands after a long echoing moment inside of his head, turning them palm out to show peace - even if he didn’t slip out of his crouch or lower his hands from their defensive position.  It was an offering only, one he was ready to take back in a heartbeat depending on the reaction.  In that pause, Shiro realized that he could hear his own heart beating, the rush of blood through his ears - but the crowd was gone, silent and faded back to wherever they’d come from.  For a second, he missed it - just because it had been sound.  A noise in his silent world.  And then the other him, the new him, was straightening up and the other two were stepping forward to join him.

“Sorry,” the first one apologized, shaking his head and Shiro only caught the apology because he expected it.  From someone that was him.  “We thought you were another drone.”

Shiro straightened and was aware, only then, that his back hurt, that the fall had banged him around, his shoulder ached, dull and slow and his mouth tasted like blood and dirt.  He supposed he should be grateful he was alive to notice any of that.  He’d been careless.  Hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings the way he should have.  What kind of world had he lived in and for how long, that he felt as if being hyper-vigilant was the natural state he should be in?  What did that say about whatever he couldn’t remember between being captured and waking up falling?  He knew it should worry him, distant mental alarm bells and yet he pushed it to the back - because, alarming or not, he had more immediate things to concentrate on.  So he shook his head too, stopped himself before it got too far just to differentiate himself from the man across from him with his movements.  He showed his palms, now at his sides, once more before slowly making the decision to walk toward them.

“I would have done the same,” it was dry, a joke and he watched the response to it war in three sets of eyes.  The one on the right laughed first and everyone else eased up.  Shiro reached up with his left arm and rubbed his ear.

“I can’t hear.  Anything,” he hated confessing it, hated the sick way it made his stomach feel to say it out loud and make it real but there didn’t seem to be any point in hiding it.  Not from a group of himself.  He understood, mentally, in the part of him that loved horror stories and always offered the worst possible outcome to any situation, that just because they looked like him didn’t mean they thought like him.  Any one of them could be wearing his face and have a monster inside.  Shiro wasn’t entirely certainly he didn’t have one inside himself, given his strange violent first thought responses to so much.  But - the way they stood, the way they shifted, the way they angled toward each other - it was him.  It was him, it was him, it was him.  Whatever was inside of them - it was him too.  He rolled his right shoulder, felt it crack but it was a solid feeling, things settled into place.  Watched their eyes go wide and then their brows, all at the same time, come down in understanding.  It was - eerie, watching them all move exactly the same.  He offered a smile.

“This is weird getting used to.  Drones?”

“Yeah,” the first one nodded, and then made a shoulder movement that Shiro knew perfectly well meant ‘yeah’ to both.  A hand gesture and he moved around some of the wreckage.  Shiro hesitated - it left two of him at his back and he wouldn’t hear them if they came at him - but then he followed.  He had to make a decision about whether he was going to trust his multiple new twins or not at some point and he might as well do it now.  Around the wreckage was the remains of what looked like an alien suit of armor and something in Shiro, for just a second, went purple and cold and green and alien and threatened.  He squinted against it and knelt down next to the suit but the man next to it reached out and lightly touched his shoulder.  He looked up into his own concerned face.

“You get it too?  Flashes of - something.  Like memories you can’t place?  Or do you get actual memories?”

Shiro sat back on his heels, surprised.  So used to his own twin that he’d just -

“I do.  I remember things, my life - our life - “ he added because it seemed wrong to deny it to - himself even if the himself was standing outside his own body and in multiples.  “I remember things pretty clearly up until our capture on Kerberos and getting dragged past rows of holding cells.  Nothing after that.  Not until I woke up in a falling tube here.  But - sometimes things - they trigger something inside me.  Usually cold and sick feelings.  Things I can’t remember but maybe I should be glad I can’t remember.  You too?”

The twin shook his head and dropped down to rest on his heels near Shiro as well.  Hooked a thumb over his shoulder.

“Ta remembers.  Mostly like you’ve said.  I’ve got no memories at all,” the terror of that was buried under his face but Shiro knew what to watch for, saw it around the edges of his eyes and his lips.  He kept talking.  “Shi says he doesn’t remember anything but he gets flashes of emotion and reactions like you say.”

Shiro paused, soaked that in.   _ _Incomplete.__  The word whispered in the back of his head.  Some of us were incomplete.  

Incomplete for what purpose?

His eyes focused on the man next to him.  Couldn’t stop the smile despite knowing it was an emotional reaction to the stress and madness as much as humor.

“You’d be Ka then?”

The twin looked like he’d hit a glass door for a split second and then dipped his head to laugh.  Raised it a moment later to meet his eyes and he looked - better than he had a second ago.

“Yeah.  I’m Ka.  We figured we’d split the name to make it easier.”

Shiro had to grin, even if it made his chest hurt strangely too.

“You’re doing better than I am.”  A pause and he lifted one of the armored arms of the metal armor in front of him, found it heavy and attached with wires and understood ‘drone’ better, shifting to mess with the ‘helmet’ piece that turned out to be a ‘head’ in a robotic sense of the word.  Somehow it didn’t surprise him the way it should have even if handling the bot did send a strange need to rip it to shreds and run at the same time down through him.  He decided to go all in.

“I’ve just mentally been referring to the other me that I partnered up with as ‘twin’.”

“There’s more?”

Shiro saw the face that went with it and felt it himself.  Because he had been feeling it all along.  There was so many of them dead.  So many.  Hundreds.  Maybe thousands.  And yet - some of them were alive too.  

What if one of the alive ones was out there, hurt and in need, struggling - and they never found him and he died alone, here, surrounded by dead bodies and no one?  Just out of ear range or eye sight or just over the next pile of wreckage.  Struggling for help alone.  What if they never found him?

Or them?

“There’s two more.  Beyond me,” he said after a moment.  “Another twin and - Fred.  He’s - something’s wrong with him.  We found him but he’s unresponsive.  And - he doesn’t look like us.  Not like this at least.  I came out here to get him.”

He didn’t know what his voice gave away, couldn’t hear it or see his own face but something in Ka’s face reflected a mix of dread and understanding.

“We should go get him then,” was all the other man said.

Leave no man behind.  It just wasn’t in their nature.  Shiro stood.  Rubbed his hands against the fabric of his suit as if he could wipe off whatever the feeling the drone had left on his palms was. Nodded and looked around to see the other two twins nearby and listening.  They were standing, he noticed, shoulder against shoulder.  He suddenly, very badly, wanted his own, well known ‘twin’.

“Come on.  Fred’s not far.”

If he’d stayed put.  If nothing else had come along.  Suddenly it seemed important to hurry.  Shiro tried walking normally for a minute and then gave it up, breaking into a trot.  He didn’t turn his head to check, but he knew the triples were following him.

He also noticed that, despite the beating he’d taken, his body was moving smoothly and the aches were barely there any more.  His body was different.  Different from the one his memory was used to.  And he thought about all of the bits of wire and metal that had been dangling outside of Fred -

And tried, very hard, not to think of what that might implicate about him as well.

The distance from where he’d angled to come out of the fallen wreck to the place they’d left Fred wasn’t that far but there was a great deal of broken off pieces and jagged hills of metal between here and there and he was aware, still, that if he hurt himself carelessly here, it could be the end.  There weren’t any hospitals nearby.  At least none they knew of or that they could get to.  So, despite himself, he took his way carefully, circling around instead of scrambling over large sections.  The triples kept pace.  And he noticed that they all moved in perfect sync.  It was - eerie, watching it and he found himself all the more determined not to match them even if falling into pattern with them was easy.  They moved just the way he did.

Finally he spotted the small cave of fallen struts they’d left Fred sheltered in and couldn’t stop the exhale of relief.  With Fred so close, he found he was now worrying about the twin he’d left inside the station alone with the Galra.  Was it going to be this way?  Was he was always going to want everyone clustered close so he could keep an eye on them, worrying when they were out of eyesight.

“Fred,” he called it as he approached, slowing down, not wanting to startle the other man.  He wasn’t sure Fred could be startled but he didn’t want to find out the hard way.  As protective as he felt of the other man, a part of him was still waiting for something that wasn’t him, wasn’t them, to flare to life behind the blank eyes.  Too many horror movies - on a planet that was built for horror.

“Fred,” he said it softer as he ducked into the small protected space they’d left the man in, looking automatically to where they’d left him sitting.  His stomach took a quick trip upward and twisted.

Because the space was empty.

A quick check of the small interior showed it was just as empty and a part of him, that dark part, was relieved that at least there weren’t parts of his wounded twin to be found, no spatters of blood on the metal.  He backed out quickly, almost running into one of the triplets as he did so.  Ka, he thought, not sure if he recognized the difference or just wanted to.  

“He’s not here.  We left him here.”

The panic was a tight thing in his chest, pulling his lungs closed.  What if something had come and taken Fred?  What if he’d gotten up and wandered off?  The other man was strange, potentially beyond saving and yet, even if it made things difficult - more difficult - Shiro couldn’t stand the thought of losing him.  He was one of them.  One of __him__.  No one should be left alone to die in a place like this.

The other two triples had spread out, providing cover he realized belatedly, or at least being lookouts, and one of them must have yelled because the other two swiveled their heads in that direction at the same time.  He looked as well, following their lead and saw the way the one that the other two had looked at gestured.  He was scrambling up the side of the fallen struts a second later.  And there -

There was Fred.

He’d been as close to comatose as Shiro had thought he could be and still walk with support the entire time Shiro had seen him.  Now his blank face, with its smattering of scruffy beard and long white streaked hair was raised.  Standing on top of the pile, missing arm dangling wires and tubes, Fred’s eyes never blinked, looking upward at the midnight sky above.  His lips moved and Shiro’s own face suddenly shot upward, looking above.  At the distant stars.

One of them was moving.

“They’re coming,” he had said.

**Author's Note:**

> look maybe dreamworks was willing to waste all those perfectly good Shiros but I was not! Did you SEE all those tubes?! We could have all had our own Shiro. Its a damn shame is what it is and I for one will not stand for it (kinda). On a more serious note, I really don't know if I'm going to go anywhere with this or not, but this part I had to write. All Shiros are good Shiros. Even clones. Especially clones. And here's some
> 
> [amazing artwork](https://janestrider.tumblr.com/post/176038778412/in-the-dim-light-he-lifts-his-eyes-grateful) here by janestrider over on tumblr


End file.
